Passions in Poetry News

April 15, 1999:  As usual, this update to the web site brings a few changes to Passions. Many of those, though, are under-the-hood changes that you'll only notice subtly (faster loading pages) or won't notice at all for a few more weeks (static file names now, so we can update the site more often). Of course the biggest change, as always, is the huge influx of new poetry. It varies a bit (probably one of those moon things), but we're now receiving about 40 to 50 new poems a day. There are a lot of very talented poets in this wonderful digital world.

Little Things

The more visible changes won't effect the way you read poetry on a day-to-day basis, but will impact the way you interact with the web site. Our voting rules, for example, have changed. Now that we are posting visitor comments on the poems, taken from the voting form, it no longer makes sense to limit everyone to a single vote a day. You can now vote as often as you'd like, though we'll still count only one vote per author per day for each visitor. That's simply to discourage little Jenny from voting for her sister's poem 500 times a day. You can read them the next time you hit the voting booth.

We're also adding a few new off-the-site features. You can now register to be notified when the web site is updated so you don't miss any of the great new poems we're posting. Send us your email, and within hours of a new site update we'll send you a message. You'll find a link on all of the Poetry Index pages.

We've added a number of new sub-categories, and will probably continue to do so as the situation merits. One of our new categories, called More Love Poems, exists only so we can keep our poem index pages at a reasonable size. There's well over a thousand poems on the site now, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to make it both easy to find them and still list them without the need to eat dinner while the page is loading.

For the same reason, we've added additional "Next Poem" buttons on each poetry page - so you'll have to go back to the big index pages far less frequently.

Big Things

The biggest news, besides so many new poems, is that we've posted a new "Favorite Poem" of the month. Be sure to check out February's winner right away, because next week we'll be posting March's.

Just as exciting as the winning poet, however, we've also added a new Visitor of the Month award. After all, without our great visitors, the poets would be playing to an empty room. You can read all about it, of course, on the Favorites page.

Don't Go Away

Our next update is going to be very, very soon. It has to be - I have so many poems yet to post my hard disk is running out of space. And, yea, in addition to several hundred more poems, you can be pretty sure I'll have a few more surprises in store for everyone. There'll be a number of additional Little Things. And maybe even one or two really Big Things, too.